Our project focused on the germination rates of various species of plants. We were interested in how the seed coat affected the dormancy of a seed and would nicking the seed coat decrease the amount of time a seed needed to germinate. To do this we germinated seeds in petri dishes. Our control was a dish with 10 seeds that did not have their seed coat altered. We chose to use 6 different species so we had 6 dishes each with ten seeds. We then took 10 seeds of each species and nicked their seed coat where the cotyledon should first start to emerge. We checked in the seeds every 12 hours for 3 days to see how quickly each type of seed germinated. We recorded the initial sign of germination, fully germinated seeds, and growth of the cotyledon up to 2cm in length. We then ran a t-test looking at how many seeds germinated on days 1.5-3 days amongst all species comparing the nicked seeds with the control group. None of our p-values showed statistical significance with 5% significance levels. This told us that the nicked seeds did not germinate any faster than the control.
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